thread startermacrumors 6502a

The VT one has more that 2200 2.3Ghz processors in more than 1100 xserves. Each Xserve having 4 Gigs of memory.

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Except it isn't tightly integrated like a NUMA machine is. Each Xserve can only access it's own local memory and discs. Big iron like this really is different; a 512-cpu NUMA machine is hardly the equivalent of 512 PCs. Individually the PCs may be faster at some things (like integer computation). Considered as a collective they're often a lot slower, especially on I/O (where the PCs get their heads handed to them) and on data sets too large to fit in a mere 4 GB of RAM (note the Altix maxes out at 48 GB per cpu).

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